British archaeologists are seeking to authenticate what could be a landmark discovery in the documentation of early Christianity: a trove of 70 lead codices that appear to date from the 1st century CE, which may include key clues to the last days of Jesus’ life. As UK Daily Mail reporter Fiona Macrae writes, some researchers are suggesting this could be the most significant find in Christian archeology since the Dead Sea scrolls in 1947.

I saw The Philadelphia Story at CCU last night; it was fun and funny. When I read the below quotation from G.K. Chesterton this morning, I was reminded that ancient Greek drama had its roots in Dionysian worship, and in pre-Christian England, pagan religious rituals involved dramatic, theatrical elements.

For some reason, humans always have desired to worship, and desired to express that worship with their bodies, through dance, repeated stories, and rituals.

“Ritual is really much older than thought; it is much simpler and wilder than thought. A feeling touching the nature of things does not only make men feel that there are certain proper things to say; it makes them feel that there are certain proper things to do. The more agreeable of these consist of dancing, building temples, and shouting very loud; the less agreeable, of wearing green carnations and burning other philosophers alive. But everywhere the religious dance came before the religious hymn, and man was a ritualist before he could speak.” — G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

The spiritual and religious cures that deal exclusively with intangible, unseen things ignore the full picture of human nature.

The spiritual and religious cures seem to be dualistic, making the body like oil on top of the mind’s or spirit’s water.

The assumption is if the mind or spirit gets right, the body will get right, too.

Is this dualistic view orthodox? Difficult to answer. In Christianity, the believer is promised a resurrected body.

Can we really overcome a bad neural pathway in the brain without directly engaging the brain? Tough question. God does seem to empower some people to overcome temptations.

No matter how you answer those questions, consider this: if our bodies engage with material things for bad habits, our bodies should also engage with material things for good habits.

Good rituals, and habitual engagement with good symbols, might not replace a bad habit, but rituals with good symbols would be better than no bodily engagement at all. (Along those lines, see my argument in favor of Montessori-based Christian education here.)

What starved senses in a man who can only think of his body as engaged in the bad, and only think of some intangible part of himself as engaged with the good.

How does this non-material, non-biological view of change track with the Incarnation? If flesh and bone is, in and of itself, sinful, how could He who knew no sin have taken on flesh and bone? I think “flesh” would include the brain.

As researchers interviewed for this MSNBC article said, humans can strengthen good habits.

Imagine Christian spirituality this way: At the bottom, we have natural law, or the moral law that C.S. Lewis describes in an appendix to his book The Abolition of Man. This is the moral law that seems to have been consistently intuited by humans throughout history. However, it is also a moral law that we all, to greater or lesser degrees, have violated.

At the top, we have God’s help, God’s power that enables people to do truly good things and overcome selfishness. As G.K. Chesterton said in his book Heretics, the only requirement for selfishness is to have a self (which is why “education” in information and basic knowledge won’t make better people).

Let me jump back to a wide angle on this topic: I seriously doubt that Christian evangelists and apologists can adequately engage the world without some understanding of brain research. What makes us human? What’s the norm for being human? What do we assign to the intangible, unseen realm that is actually tangible, if located in the dark cave of the skull?

While my hope is in the free gift of the New Covenant, I do not believe that God controls everything we become. As it turns out, as humans, as biological beings with brains, at least part of who we are, at least part of who we make ourselves to be, depends upon what we do. We can be staunch believers in that New Covenant and still have no pattern of life or practice that associates with Biblical patterns or Christian symbols.

I’ve been trying to avoid the fuss about Love Wins by Rob Bell — sometimes I tire of intellectual controversies that never advance — but today I saw a sympathetic look at universalism (and a mention of Bell’s book) on a blog by a scholar I like. So I thought about a resource that might serve as a reasonable pivot point on the topic. I recalled that the wonderful, late Richard John Neuhaus had written a thoughtful, historical and Scripture-informed consideration of universalism: Will All Be Saved? Please read it and consider it.

From a survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Religion News Service:

“7-in-10 Americans see God as a person with whom one can have a relationship, and a majority (56%) say God is in control of everything that happens in the world.

“However, less than 4-in-10 (38%) believe earthquakes, floods and other natural disasters are a sign from God; and even fewer (29%) believe that God sometimes punishes nations for the sins of some of its citizens. White evangelical Protestants are the exception to this pattern. Among evangelicals, about 6-in-10 (59%) believe natural disasters are a sign from God, and a smaller majority (53%) believe that God judges nations for the sins of some of their citizens. Only one-in-five white mainline Protestants or Catholics believe God punishes nations for the sins of some.

“Nearly 6-in-10 (58%) Americans say that the severity of recent natural disasters is evidence of global climate change, compared to 44% who say that the severity of recent natural disasters is evidence of what the Bible calls the ‘end times.’

“More than 8-in-10 also say that providing financial assistance to Japan is very important (42%) of somewhat important (41%) despite economic challenges at home. Support is high across political and religious groups.”

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"And the missionaries, they tell us we will be left behind. / Been left behind a thousand times, a thousand times." -- Arcade Fire

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Incapable of doubt, incapable of faith

The majority of mankind is lazy-minded, incurious, absorbed in vanities, and tepid in emotion, and is therefore incapable of either much doubt or much faith. -- T.S. Eliot, Introduction (1931), Pascal's "Pensees"

Problem or Mystery?

A problem is something which I meet, which I find completely before me, but which I can therefore lay siege to and reduce. But a mystery is something in which I am myself involved, and it can therefore only be thought of as a sphere where the distinction between what is in me and what is before me loses its meaning and initial validity. -- Gabriel Marcel

i. Not to go backward, not to watch the women peddling in reverse past the church, the priest in his black habit receding from the chapel door. Not to go backward, the bones of August becoming the bones of March, branch of dogwood picked clean by frost. Not to say Yes […]

[New Entry by Andy Hamilton on August 1, 2015.] Conservatism and its modernising, anti-traditionalist rivals, liberalism and socialism, are the dominant political philosophies and ideologies of the post-Enlightenment era. Conservatives criticise their rivals for making a utopian exaggeration of the power of theoretical reason, and of human perfectibility. Co […]

[Revised entry by Peter Thielke and Yitzhak Melamed on July 31, 2015. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Salomon Maimon (1753 - 1800) stands as one of the most acute, original, and complicated thinkers - and certainly one of the most fascinating personalities - of the 1780s and 1790s. By granting the principle of sufficient reason unlimited validity Maimon […]

Ancient Ethics Ethical reflection in ancient Greece and Rome starts from all of an agent’s ends or goals and tries to systematize them. Our ends are diverse. We typically want, among other things, material comfort, health, respect from peers and love from friends and family, successful children, healthy emotional lives, and intellectual achievement. We see … […]

Zhou Dunyi (Chou Tun-i, 1017-1073) Zhou Dunyi (sometimes romanized as Chou Tun-i and also known by his posthumous name, Zhou Lianxi) has long been highly esteemed by Chinese thinkers. He is considered one of the first “Neo-Confucians,” a group of thinkers who draw heavily on Buddhist and Daoist metaphysics to articulate a comprehensive, Confucian religious […]

In a new paper just out in Neuron, researchers Timothy Laumann and colleagues present an in-depth look at a single human brain. The brain in question belongs to neuroscientist Russ Poldrack, and he's one of the authors of the paper. Poldrack was fMRI scanned a total of 84 times over a period of 532 days. The goal of this intense scanning schedule was to […]

The scientific controversy over social priming - the (claimed) ability of incidental exposure to stimuli to 'prime' or evoke complex behaviors - has been rumbling for the past few years. Will it ever end? In this post I'll propose one way in which I think it could be resolved. 'Social priming' is a fascinating concept. A paradigmatic […]

"In fostering such dialogue between theologians and scientists who are Christians, BioLogos is forging a middle ground between presentations of science that are antagonistic towards faith and faith that will not accommodate science." -Joshua Swamidass

Renata Adler the novelist trusts her readers to sift detail, make inferences, read against the grain of the narrative voice. Renata Adler the journalist expects a reader's full trust even as her conclusions become increasingly suspect

Liturgy For The People

The liturgy is essentially not the religion of the cultured, but the religion of the people. If the people are rightly instructed, and the liturgy is properly carried out, they display a simple and profound understanding of it. For the people do not analyze concepts, but contemplate. The people possess that inner integrity of being which corresponds perfectly with the symbolism of the liturgical language, imagery, action and ornaments. The cultured man has first of all to accustom himself to this attitude; but to the people it has always been inconceivable that religion should express itself by abstract ideas and logical developments, and not by being and action, by imagery and ritual. --Romano Guardini, "The Awakening of the Church in the Soul"

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The Anguished Question

If you really enquire about God, not with mere curiosity, not, as it were, like a spiritual stamp collector, but as an anxious seeker, distressed in heart, anguished by the possibility that God might not exist and hence all life be vanity and one great madness -- if you ask in such a mood as the man who asks the doctor, "Tell me, will my wife live or will she die?"-- if you ask thus about God, then you know already that God exists; the anguished question bears witness that you know.
-- Emil Brunner, "Our Faith"